


With Nothing on My Tongue

by RosieTwiggs



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Antisemitism, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jewish!Silver, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Trauma, Underage Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-27 00:51:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14414118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosieTwiggs/pseuds/RosieTwiggs
Summary: "Silver thinks: Maybe God likes it when I fight with him.He wonders now, whether he’s been playing into God’s plan all along. Because no matter how angry he gets, how defensive, how many “fuck you”s he flings to the heaven, isn’t it all just proof that he still believes God is there, despite it all?Silver doesn’t know how to counter that.Maybe he doesn’t want to anymore."The Jewish!John Silver character study no one asked for, but you're all getting anyway.





	With Nothing on My Tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HighSeasMarginalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HighSeasMarginalia/gifts).



> This fic would not exist without tikkunolamorgtfo on tumblr. Honestly, it started with her headcanons, and was fuelled by our combined Jewish pain.
> 
> To say this fic destroyed me would be to understate how much of my own soul I put into it.
> 
> Please heed the warnings and tags. This fic is... the darkest thing I've ever written.
> 
> Title from Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

His very first memory is of his mother praying as she put him to bed. Warm words in another language rolling over her tongue, words that felt alive, that felt safe, that wrapped him up in comfort and sent him off to sleep.

His second memory is of his father looking down at him in disgust before turning back to the table, and spitting out two words. “Fucking Jew.”

For years, Silver was never sure why his mother stayed. Why she didn’t take him and his little brother and go somewhere far, far away.

The wisdom of time and of ancient hatred ultimately helps him to understand. She had nowhere to go. Chewed up and spit out by her community, her husband, the world at large. There was no one who wanted her.

~*~

Talking to God, she calls it when he asks.

Words carry weight, carry power. She tells him stories, reading to him from a small, leather-bound book. Stories about lost sons who became kings, about the seas splitting in two, about women destroying fearsome generals, and about little boys slaying giants. About how God spoke the world into existence.

It isn’t like the church his father drags him and Solomon to on Sundays. They are forced into scratchy linen shirts, and any argument earns them sharp slaps to the face, or worse. Then the long trek to the shabby building that smells of damp and moldy bread, where a preacher screams at them about sin, and people whisper behind their hands when they walk past. People claim to be talking to God there as well.

His mother though, murmurs softly under her breath before she eats her food. Speaks a blessing when she makes their bread. And on Fridays when his father is out drunk at the tavern, she lights candles and invites God into their home.

Silver looks for him expectantly, every time, but can never seem to find him.

“He’s here, Yonatan,” his mother tells him in Spanish, “you cannot see him, but he is here nevertheless. And he is always listening.”

But a part of him wonders. If he is always there, why do his mother’s pleas and screams when his father beats them go unanswered?

~*~

The first time Silver speaks to God, he is eight years old, and his father is gone. He left them in a rage, no longer able to stand the shame of having fathered two little Jewish boys. He gives them one good final beating before he takes everything of value and leaves.

Silver's eye is swollen shut and his lip is cracked, but he’d managed to shield Solomon from the brunt of it. His mother can’t get out of bed, having taken one too many kicks to the stomach.

But he is gone.

They have no money, no food, no prospects. But he is gone.

John winces, prodding at the split on his cheekbone and something stirs in him.

“Thank you,” he murmurs. That’s all. But it’s everything.

The second time Silver speaks to God, he is nine, and his mother is dead.

She never does manage to recover from his father’s last “gift”, growing more and more ill as the winter comes on. But she still lights those damned candles until the very end.

The cold ground is hard beneath his feet, the frost turning everything to ashy desolation. Solomon is clinging to his hand, lost and alone.

And John swears on his mother’s soul that he will take care of him. He will keep him safe, even if God won’t.

He looks up at the sky through red-rimmed eyes, and spits out, “Fuck you.”

~*~

His father’s name is average, English, Christian, and safe. But he cannot bring himself to keep it. It is vile and hateful and embodies a world that would cast him out.

But he cannot take his mother’s name either. People will know. People _can’t_ know.

So De Silva is repurposed and John Silver is born. He doesn’t mind keeping John. His father had named him for one of the apostles in some attempt to stamp the truth from his soul, but Silver had the last laugh. John was just another form of Yonatan, and no one would ever take the truth from him.

The only thing he keeps of his mother’s is the small, leather bound book.

John and Solomon Silver make their way to London. Maybe they’ll be able to find a home there. A life. A story.

~*~

In the beginning, he prays every night. He prays with Solomon, because it keeps his brother’s night terrors at bay and reminds him of their mother. Those words that are his very first memory, branded on his heart, are spoken in soft, secret whispers, under the shared covers, lest the other boys in the orphanage find out.

And each night, as his mouth forms the words, his mind speaks other words, in a one-sided conversation with God.

Usually, he’ll think about his day, how the new matron seems to sense something’s different about them, about the new boy with the cleft lip who was beaten in the yard, or about how Solomon’s shoes are becoming too tattered to use anymore. There’s never a request or a plea. He just talks and hopes that God is listening.

As he nears thirteen, he thinks about how he’ll soon be put out of the home, leaving Solomon on his own.

Even then, he doesn’t ask God to intervene. He’ll figure it out himself.

~*~

It’s… difficult. He steals at first, but can barely steal enough to feed himself. Lodging is out of the question. Over time he manages to procure odd jobs, here and there, scrounging and saving as much as he can. By the time winter truly and harshly sets in, he makes enough to share a small room with two other boys, roughly his age.

Solomon is safe for a couple more years at the orphanage, and over time, they settle into a rhythm, meeting secretly every day towards dusk at the back kitchen window to talk.

“Is that little shit Theodore still bothering you?”

“No, not since you kicked him in the balls at the park last week.”

“Good.”

“Yonah?”

John sighs, balancing on the top of the fence and glancing behind his little brother to make sure no one else heard him. “I’ve told you not to call me that anymore.”

“Sorry.”

John shakes his head, but ruffles Sol’s hair. “What is it?”

“When can I come live with you again?”

And it’s funny, because when John was his age, he’d already had to figure out how to fend for the two of them on his own, but he won’t have his baby brother needing to make those same choices and have those same concerns.

“Sol…”

“I think matron Annabelle knows.”

Ice spreads through Silver’s veins.

“Knows what?”

Solomon shivers at a sudden sharp wind. Silver’s gotten used to the cold at this point.

“I think she heard me praying the other night.”

“Fuck.”

He doesn’t berate him. What use would that be? There is one thing in the world other than Silver that gives his little brother comfort, who is he to take that away?

They part ways with a warning to stay wary. There’s not much more either of them can do right now.

~*~

The next time Silver is supposed to meet his brother, Sol isn’t there. He waits outside the window for half an hour, unease building in him until he forces himself to go to the front door and ring the bell.

The tall, severe looking woman who answers the door informs him in no uncertain terms, that young Solomon Silver is atoning for his sins and will not be tainted by his heretic of a brother any longer.

“What the _hell_ does that mean?!” he asks, panic rising in his throat.

Matron Anabelle sneers at him. “He was baptized this morning. He put up quite a fuss. We had to restrain him.”

“What?!”

His mother had once told him the story of Samson, and how, having been robbed of his strength, captured, punished and humiliated by the Philistines, he had prayed in his final moments for justice and brought the pillars of the entire arena down around his captors.

A flame lights in Silver’s heart and he prays in that moment.

“You’re gonna help me right now,” he murmurs under his breath, as the matron begins to close the door. “If you ever gave a fuck about me, about him, you’re going to help me.”

He pushes at the door with every bit of strength he has, sending matron Anabelle flying backwards, and storms into the orphanage.

The rector comes running out of his office, but Silver grabs a book from a side table and flings it at him, striking him directly between the eyes.

Shouts follow his mad dash upstairs. When he reaches the room Solomon shares with the other boys, he isn’t there.

He’s desperate, turning in circles to try and figure out where, how…

“The attic room,” a small voice says from behind him. It’s the little boy with the cleft lip, the one the other children beat when they’re angry.

A flood of relief fills him, and he nods, rushing for the rickety stairs at the end of the hall.

He takes them three at a time. It sounds like the rector has recovered and he and the other matrons are on their way up after him.

“Solomon!” he shouts, banging on the door. “Sol!”

“Yonah?” The small voice on the other end is scared.

He puts his shoulder to the door and begins trying to smash it open. It’s not a very strong door.

“Move back, Solomon!”

He gives the door a kick, and one last shove, and goes crashing through, falling to the ground. His eyes scan the room in terror, trying to find something, anything-

There. He grabs an old coat rack and doesn’t hesitate before shoving it through the attic window.

“Come on!”

Solomon takes his hand, as he’s taken it so many times before, and follows him out onto the roof just as Matron Anabelle comes huffing into the room, clutching her side.

“Thief! Kidnapper!” she screams. But Silver’s already helping Solomon shimmy down the side of the building. They both have to drop the last couple of meters, and Silver’s going to feel every scrape, every bruise tomorrow morning, but Solomon can’t stay here any longer.

The two of them run from the yard and disappear in to the late afternoon rush.

~*~

“Tell me a story,” Solomon asks him one night. The air is chilled, and the darkness complete, but as nights go, they’ve had worse.

Silver leans back against the wall of the tiny room. They’re alone tonight, the other boys off on odd jobs, or stealing, or just drinking themselves into a stupor at a cheap tavern

Silver hasn’t stopped all day, running errands for a cobbler, unloading a fishing boat at the Thames, sweeping chimneys until night crept in. He smells, and aches, and there is nothing he would like to do more just now than sleep, to sink into black nothing and forget about his hunger, his despair, how fucking cold he always is.

But Solomon’s escape are the stories Silver tells, so he takes a deep breath and lets it out in a slow, measured sigh.

“I knew a boy named Solomon Little.”

Solomon snorts and rolls his eyes, but doesn’t interrupt.

“I know, I know, you share a name, but this is a different Solomon, I swear. I met him in our first year at the orphanage. You were too young to remember.”

“I was six.”

“And _do_ you remember the other Solomon?”

Sol narrows his eyes but just laughs and leans back against his brother. “No,” he says, resignedly.

Silver grins. “As I said. Now Solomon Little, appeared in the dead of night, shortly after we’d arrived. He wasn’t at the orphanage long, just a couple of months, but in those months I managed to glean the most astounding, most spectacular secret – one that no one else, not even the rector knew.”

“What was it?” Solomon asks, his voice a little breathless.

Silver glances down at his brother, eyes widening, and lowering his voice to nearly a whisper.

“Solomon Little was no orphan. He was, in fact, the son of a great king in the Ottoman Empire, hidden away by his mother, who, fearing for their lives after a hostile takeover by a neighboring kingdom, had fled to London to petition the King for assistance.”

“He was _not_.”

“I’m sorry, who was the one who remembers little Little – you or me?”

Solomon huffs but falls silent again.

Silver continues. “Of course, the enemy king had spies everywhere, and Solomon’s mother couldn’t very well take her son with her, for fear the only remaining heir to the throne would be assassinated, so she did the one thing no one would ever expect her to do.”

“What was that?” his brother asks in a small voice, and Silver grins.

“She deposited him in a small orphanage of questionable repute, with a bag of gems as payment, and explicit instructions that Solomon was not to be harmed, and that someone would eventually come for him.”

“A bag of gems?” Solomon says in awe, and Silver nods.

“I saw it myself, once, on the rector’s desk when he’d carelessly left his office door open. He caught me staring and had me beaten. Remember that time I couldn’t sit for a week for the lashes on my backside?”

Sol’s face lights up at the memory, one that now lends credence to rest of the story. “I do!”

It’s all tying together nicely now. “Solomon Little was the one who discovered me after the beating. He was different than the other children…” Silver let’s his tone trail off theatrically. “There was something untouchable about him, as though the weariness and despair that had taken us all over simply slid off of him like water slides off of an oiled shackle. So he was kind, in a place where kindness had been forgotten.”

“You were always kind to me, Yonah.”

Silver smiles. “Some things keep you tethered to yourself, no matter how hard others may try to pull you away.”

“So, Solomon Little told you he was a prince?”

“Exactly. He told me the whole story. How his mother would be coming for him soon, to return him to his homeland where he would rebuild his father’s palace and lead his people to glory.”

Sol sighs, and when Silver glances down at him, his eyelids are beginning to droop.

“What happened to him?”

“To Solomon Little?” Silver asks, not expecting an answer, lost in the cadence of the storytelling. “Oh. We all woke up one morning and he’d gone. But I’d glimpsed him in the night, a woman, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, wrapped him in a velvet cloak. She had a giant of a man with her, so large that when he stood straight, his head near brushed the ceiling, and he had a spear strapped to his back, and a curved sword at his hip. Everything was dark, and I don’t think the matrons knew that Solomon’s mother had come to claim him at last. But he gave me one final wave before he-“

A light snore interrupts Silver, and he glances down to find Solomon fast asleep.

He lays him down on the wooden pallet they share, and hesitates all of two seconds before murmuring the night time prayer, and for once, the words make their winding way into his heart, embedding themselves into the beat of his soul as he asks God to keep his brother safe.

~*~

There’s never enough money.

He finds Solomon one day cowering away from one of the boys they share the room with, his cheek split and bleeding, a large bruise forming on his side when he looks him over.

The boy had been bored and decided to use Sol for sport.

It’s a miracle Silver doesn’t kill him. As it is, when Silver finally bundles up all their belongings and his brother to go, the boy is groaning on the floor, his face is swollen and unrecognizable and three fingers on his right hand are bent at a grotesque angle. He’d made his living as a tailor’s apprentice.

Things go downhill from there.

Lodgings aren’t easy to come by, and now Silver fears leaving his brother alone for too long.

Solomon should be growing, thriving. Instead, he watches his brother’s frame dwindle, much as his own has begun to do. They’re subsisting on old loaves of bread and whatever looks halfway edible in the trash heaps.

If they have to face another winter like this, Silver fears they may not come out the other end of it.

“Some help would be nice,” he mutters bitterly to the empty air, watching Solomon scrape a moldy bit off of his bread.

“What?” his brother asks, but Silver just shakes his head.

~*~

It’s a sudden decision, even if it feels like he’s been gradually moving towards it all along.

“Oh, aren’t you just a lovely little thing.”

Silver glances up for a second, taking in the woman’s painted face, full skirts, and breasts spilling out of a too-tight corset before rolling his eyes and ignoring her. He garners comments like this often enough in the street after dark. He’s become painfully aware over the last year that now, at fifteen, his dark complexion, blue eyes, and long curls mark him as a rare beauty.

The woman, however, doesn’t stop. “You know, with a pretty little mouth like that, you could be making a shilling a night, easy, maybe more.”

He slows, but doesn’t stop.

“You ask me, I reckon there’s a fair few who’d like to tug on those curls too.”

Silver swallows, a shiver of revulsion going through him at the image she’s conjured up in his mind, despite the warm night.

No.

No he doesn’t think he will.

He rushes off, the woman shouting, “Suit yourself!” down the road after him.

Fuck it if he can’t stop thinking about it though.

Solomon’s shoes have just about worn through (again), and he doesn’t have anything approaching warm clothes for the winter. He holds out for another few days, running messages for docked ships, barely scrounging together a couple pence. Solomon tags along, but having his little brother with him is actually less likely to land him a job.

The landlady threatens to put them out if he can’t pay her by tomorrow night.

A shilling. Fuck what he couldn’t do with a whole shilling.

“Here,” he says, handing Solomon his half of the bread he’d stolen earlier.

But Solomon shakes his head. “I’m fine. I found an apple on the street before, and the baker’s wife down the road was throwing out old pastries and gave me one.”

It’s the lie that finally settles it. His brother hasn’t eaten anything all day and is still determined that they split the bread.

A shilling would pay for another week’s lodgings and buy them four loaves of bread.

Fuck.

~*~

People cry out for God all the time at the brothel.

Silver’s surprised at how similar the place feels to the church they used to go to. Same fervor, same sense of shame, and the same whispers about him from dark corners.

 _Oh_ , but isn’t he _popular_.

A pretty face, unblemished skin, and, to the Madame’s utter delight, a circumcised cock.

“Ten pence to fuck the Jew boy, gents! And only five for that wicked mouth!”

Solomon doesn’t know where he goes at night, and Silver will make sure he never does. And the part of him that doesn’t hate the world, hate God, hate himself… That part of him flares strong and bright in his chest, because he can do this. He can give this away if it means Sol gets his stories.

~*~

They have enough to get by, and that’s more than they’ve ever had before.

Before he leaves every night, Silver reads out loud, the same stories he’d been entranced by when his mother had read them to him. Solomon likes to compare himself to the people in the stories: to Benjamin, who Joseph loved, to Moses, who Aaron spoke for. Always brothers, always sure he is safe and cared for.

It’s enough.

~*~

And then Solomon dies.

They’re out for once. The sun is blindingly bright, despite the cold, and they’re walking to get fresh pastries from the baker. They can buy fresh pastries from the baker now.

Solomon runs ahead, and Silver watches him slip on the ice, laughing as his brother flails his arms, going down.

He catches up quickly, breath forming clouds in the air, holding a hand down to help him up.

But Solomon is still, eyes staring up at nothing.

It doesn’t click in Silver’s mind, he can’t make himself understand what it is he’s looking at. There isn’t even any blood. Just crystal blue eyes mirroring the sky, and nothing else.

Eventually, Silver sits, just watching Sol’s face. There has to be more. This can’t be it - there has to be _more_.

At some point the baker’s wife comes outside and screams.

~*~

He buries his mother’s book with him.

He doesn’t say a word to God.

~*~

For months, the only difference between Silver and the little boy in the ground is that Silver is still breathing.

He sleeps for most of the day. He barely eats. He doesn’t speak.

And with the loss of words, time stops, the world stops, and Silver exists in a gray limbo of nothing.

His nights continue to be filled with raucous laughter, and rough hands, and men taking their pleasure out of him and hatred out _on_ him.

What else is there?

The Madame almost seems to care that something is very wrong with her main earner. Not enough to ask him about it, but still.

“He don’t talk this one, but his mouth works just fine otherwise. Obedient as anything. Just don’t expect a word and you won’t be disappointed.”

And that’s that.

The rules hold. The Madame’s words hold. Until one day they don’t.

“I fucked a Jewish woman once, she didn’t like it,” the man says, undoing his belt with a sly grin. “But I guess my cock was too much for her, complete as it was, not like yours.”

Silver doesn’t say anything. He’s used to this.

Something flickers in the man’s eyes, but it’s gone after a moment, the grin still firmly in place. He gets his pants loose and pulls them down.

“I wondered to myself, I wondered - what was it about having had something like you that could make her scream so when I was inside her, yeah?”

He wants an answer. He clearly wants Silver to speak, to say he doesn’t know, or that the woman was crazy, to put himself down.

He doesn’t though.

This time, the man’s grin disappears.

“She said you didn’t talk.”

Silver moves forward, reaching out for the man’s cock, before pain explodes behind his left eye and he finds himself on the floor. He winces, sitting up and gingerly pressing his fingers to his cheek.

He’s used to this too.

He gets up onto his knees.

“Say you want it. Say you want my cock and I’ll give it to you.”

Silver just shuffles forward. This time, the blow isn’t unexpected, but it still sends him reeling.

When the room stops spinning, he finds the man leering above him. There’s a knife in his hand.

Some part of Silver is aware that he should be concerned, that the danger has escalated. But he can’t bring himself to care.

In a moment, the man has a knee planted in Silver’s stomach, all of the air in his chest rushing out of him with a grunt. He can feel the edge of the knife up against his throat and struggles to get a breath in, paying no attention to how the blade nicks his skin slightly with every gasp.

“If you won’t talk, then maybe I’ll just have to cut you again, eh? Take something else off of ye. Won’t matter much, right? Most important part’s already missing.”

He waves the knife in front of Silver’s face with a laugh. “How about a finger, yeah?” Silver feels the point of the knife digging in lightly just about his third finger on his right hand. “Or maybe that tongue? You ain’t using it anyway…” The knife trails softly along his lips.

Then the man’s eyes alight on Silver’s curls.

He grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks. “I think I want to take these pretty curls home with me.”

A sliver of memory flashes through Silver’s mind, of a mad dash through an orphanage years before, of his brother’s bright but panicked eyes, of an old story, and for the first time, Silver tries to pull away.

“Stay still, you little fuck!”

The panic is rising in him now. His struggles result in a clump of hair being pulled from his head, leaving his eyes watering, but still the man is holding on, trying to get his knife up, and still Silver fights, until all at once, there’s a sickening shearing sound, and Silver’s head falls back to the floor with a thump and he’s staring up at the man holding the bulk of Silver’s curls triumphantly in one hand.

A moment of shocked silence passes, and then it’s like an explosion goes off in his mind. Silver sees red, and his blood turns to liquid fire in his veins. There’s nothing for a moment – nothing except rage. It burns through him like holy fire, and he’s lost to the power of it, unable to control it, unable to escape the hatred and anger and grief that assault him all at the same time.

When he finally comes back to himself, he’s covered in blood. His left hand is gripping the man’s neck, his thumb digging too deeply – much too deeply- into the front of it, and the other is still holding the hilt of the knife embedded in the man’s eye.

He’s shaking, but it’s the rage still coursing through him, not fear. It takes him over a minute to finally make his hands let go, and his joints creak unpleasantly when he eventually manages to release the tension in his muscles and sit back.

There are deep gouge marks on his arms, another on his cheek. He doesn’t even feel them. With a trembling hand, he reaches up and touches what’s left of his hair, and the loss of his curls somehow finally unlock the pain he’s been deadened to since he lost Solomon, and Silver sits there on top of the dead man and cries.

He can’t let himself wallow for too long. A fuck generally takes twenty minutes at most, and he isn’t sure how much time he lost. The man can’t have cried out, or if he did, it had sounded close enough to pleasure that no one had come running.

Eyes swollen, he sets his shoulders and pulls the knife out, wiping it on the man’s shirt. He then approaches the basin, washing his hands, vaguely entranced by the swirls of red appearing in the bowl, before he takes the knife and sets to work cutting what remains of his hair until it’s all uniform.

He doesn’t recognize the young man in the mirror.

Good.

He collects what he can from the room. Anything light he can sell or wear he bundles into a cloth, and then he rifles through the man’s pockets, finding a few extra coins. Then he stands over the body, his eyes drifting down to the man’s cock.

He doesn’t hesitate, leaning down with the knife, pinching the foreskin, and making a quick, efficient slice.

Then he stands up and finally speaks.

“Fuck you.”

His voice is gravelly and low and Silver had nearly forgotten what it sounded like. Then he spits emphatically, and climbs out of the window.'

He's sixteen.

~*~

Silver gets on a ship and sails as far away from England as he can get.

~*~

He fucking hates the sea.

Aside from the fact that he takes weeks to get his sea legs, all of which are spent trying to run errands as the ship’s boy in between retching and hanging over the side, there’s something about the sea…

He cannot control the sea. He cannot protect himself from it. The sea doesn’t give a shit about him.

The sea reminds him too much of God.

But it also offers him an escape. The sea is changeable, and when he awakes in the morning he is never in the same place he was when he fell asleep, and that might be worth the danger.

He disembarks in Boston, very aware of the fact that he is now standing in the New World. It should be thrilling. He is so far from everything he’s ever known, he should be feeling a flare of possibility, of expectation.

But Boston is cold, and clammy, and as he walks by brothels and bars and men shitting in the street, he thinks it looks a lot like the old world.

He gets on another ship.

~*~

Sometimes, in between journeys, he’ll stay in port for a few weeks, even more. He stays in Bridgetown for nigh on three months, fascinated by the warm air, and the sunshine, and how no one seems to care about who he is or where he’s from. He listens. He reads.

And he talks.

He discovers, on a merchant vessel bound for Belize, that his ability to tell a story is not something only Solomon had appreciated, but a talent that entrances the men around him, earning him admiration, drinks, and easier tasks on board.

Of an evening, once the bell has rung, the men will congregate on deck to listen to the young man with the silvered tongue, listening and laughing to story after story, all of which Silver swears happened to him.

They are all true.

They are all lies.

They weave in and out of reality until they _are_ reality, and Silver will gaze out at the ever-changing ocean in defiance and think, _you are not the only one who can speak worlds into existence_.

~*~

Years pass.

~*~

He’s been sailing with The Charity for several weeks, when he hears that last words he ever would have expected to hear in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Words he himself hasn’t uttered in over four years.

They’re making their way carefully down to Panama, the route circumspect to avoid pirates, and the crew has reached the point often reached on long journeys, where they’re all simply too close for comfort. This, in Silver’s experience, generally results in two things. The spilling of secrets, and violent fighting.

It’s the most dangerous time on board any ship, to his mind.

This is when he withdraws from the crew, no longer sharing stories, making himself scarce, until he can see the frenzy has passed.

At the first hint of trouble, he’s gone, finding something else to do, anything, or simply passing the time in an abandoned and hidden corner on deck. So when he walks into the crew’s quarters to see the beginnings of a brawl picking up, he turns right back around and walks out.

Hours later, after the night bell has rung and he’s heading down to sleep, he slows, picking up on the faintest whisper of… He freezes. He’s certain he just heard - but it _can’t_ be.

Turning slowly, he catches sight of a foot poking out from behind a barrel. He takes a few steps towards that foot, and peeks around.

A young man, at least his own age, and not older than four and twenty, is sitting with his back to the ship’s side, breathing slowly with his face bloody and his eyes closed, though whether they’re shut because he’s resting, or because they’ve swollen shut, he doesn’t know.

Silver should just ignore him. Just go below decks and -

But he needs to know.

He crouches down next to him and touches a hand lightly to his shoulder.

The man starts, managing to pry one eye open, though barely. That eye widens even more when he realizes what he’d just said, and that Silver had likely heard him.

He can’t even move, he’s been beaten so badly can’t even move away. But Silver already knows the truth. His heart hurts him, filled with a sudden longing for – what? He doesn’t know. Maybe this man does.

Glancing everywhere to be sure they’re alone, he takes a stupid chance, and completes the second half of the prayer that he an Sol used to say every night.

The man slumps back against the wall, and Silver thinks it’s relief that brings out the tears that look like blood, leaving tracks in the red wetness on his cheeks.

~*~

His name is Gideon Smith, and he accidentally knocked a man’s dinner to the floor. Silver’s concern that he’d been beaten because they knew what he was, putting Silver at risk as well, is laid to rest. They’re safe.

Well. As safe as one can be in close quarters with an antsy crew.

It’s been a long time since Silver has taken care of anyone, but he takes care of Gideon the best he can, cleaning him up, making sure he eats, drinks, helping him with his tasks until the bruises have faded to yellow and the swelling goes down enough that Silver can finally see that his eyes are such a deep brown, they look nearly black.

They spend their evenings on the foredeck, watching the skies, talking in quiet murmurs, and always careful to keep their words veiled, the meanings hidden. Though even now, with someone who he can trust, who is safe, he cannot bring himself to tell whole truths. He cannot conform his own existence to the truth anymore, so he gives what he can, and takes whatever is given to him in return

Gideon’s grandmother had escaped Spain, and settled in the same part of the country where Silver had grown up. He wonders to himself if they might have met under better circumstances if his father had just-

“I’ve heard there are pirates off the coast of South America. They attack Spanish ships, exacting revenge.” Gideon’s eyes shine in the moonlight and Silver can’t look away.

He doesn’t have to ask what kind of pirates, or what they’re getting revenge for. He still remembers all of his Spanish, his mother’s preferred tongue.

Gideon is the first man Silver gives himself to willingly. There’s not much privacy on a ship, but they manage to find the hidden places no one bothers with in the dark of night, hands everywhere, breathing unsteady and gasping, hot skin, and teeth and nails.

The first time Gideon drops to his knees, to pull Silver from his trousers, Silver freezes, an old terror rising in him at what Gideon will find there, until he remembers – it’s nothing different than what Gideon already knows. When his cock is finally surrounded by the wet heat of Gideon’s mouth, he cries silently, head tilted back, his throat exposed. Safe.

~*~

“Is that where you’re going when we land? To find the pirates?”

The night crew is up on deck, everyone else is asleep, and Silver and Gideon are lying naked in the hold, deep in the belly of the ship. The only light is the small lantern they carried down with them, just enough to see by.

Gideon is tracing a pattern against silver’s skin. It feels like a star. “Hmm.” He nods. “There’s a safe-haven near Brazil. An entire community hidden away from the rest of the world.”

Silver lays a kiss on Gideon’s shoulder.

“Come with me,” the young man murmurs in the dark. “We’d be with our own kind there.”

But Silver does not have a kind. Not really.

He doesn’t give Gideon an answer. Instead, he kisses him, hand trailing down to find him already half hard again.

When they reach Panama, Silver disappears into the crowd. He can hear Gideon calling for him, but he hardens his resolve and slips away, even if his heart is breaking.

~*~

Some people might call what he does in those years healing.

In truth, he is just slowly separating himself from existence until he stands alone, him against the world.

And then the ship he’s on gets taken by pirates

 

~*~

Maybe God is trying to get Silver back under his thumb. Having denied God any part in his life, in his story, for so long now… There was bound to be some backlash.

Well. Fine.

He knows fuck all about cooking but talks his way on to the crew, extra security tucked safely away in his jacket pocket, and takes on fate once again. He’ll fucking make his own way.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t account for the crew’s welcoming gift.

Any other man would have been ecstatic at finding himself surrounded by women all intent on his pleasure, but the terror he feels as they begin to undress him. His breeches are gone in no time, and the inevitability of discovery has him gripping whichever whore’s hand is trying to undo his undergarments in a vice like grip. He sees her flinch, glance down and get a good look at him.

Her eyes are deep pools, lined with black kohl, and she is very likely one of the most beautiful women he has ever laid eyes on, but in that moment, there is not a person on earth he fears more.

Their eyes meet, Silver shakes his head, the panic overcoming him, and then the woman laughs and tells the other girls that she wants to see if they can all make him come in his pants without even touching him, he's so young and smooth-cheeked.

“Are you up for the challenge, ladies?” Her accent is heavily French, and Silver’s relief means he’s never heard anything more lovely in his life.

They’re good at what they do, though he recognizes a few tricks, and he’s sticky with come and wearily sated when the whore - Max, sends the other women from the room and finally strips him down the whole way.

Silver hates the power she has over him in that moment, but can’t help digging his nails into her sides as she rides him, biting at her shoulder. He’s giving as good as he gets, because there’s going to be a price.

Of course, there’s a price. And when Max finally asks him about that piece of paper, he has no choice to but to bring her in on his plans, if only to buy her silence. Nassau may seem free, a place where men choose their own destinies, but Silver has no doubts about the limitations of those freedoms, and who is privy to them.

~*~

For the next few months, he wages a silent but desperate war with God.

He will not break first. He will not recognize God’s hand in the currents pushing him forward. He speaks only for himself, not in supplication, or request, or prayer.

It is his story. He is the storyteller.

And so when he has to run from Flint for his life, that’s what he tells himself. _My story_. And he memorizes that fucking page, glares up at the sky and spits into the flames as it burns.

He slips between the men, learning their minds. _My story_.

He talks and listens and secrets away what he needs. _My story_.

He recognizes the shifts in the tides of the others’ narratives, the weak points where his own quietly unfurled sail will turn the wind in his favor. When to refrain from speaking. And when to hand the captain a butcher’s knife.

“Billy and Morley. That night on the ship. What were they talking about?”

“Well, I didn’t hear much. But it sounded like they were talking about a woman.”

He keeps his voice low, gentle. As though he is speaking to a wild stallion. And Flint _looks_ half wild.

“Somebody… Barlow.”

_My story._

~*~

Eleanor Guthrie calls him selfish. Greedy. She blames him for what’s happened to Max.

“I know _all_ I need to know about the kind of man you are.”

Silver flinches at the dual meaning, at the venom in that sentence, and he experiences a moment of terror. _Max told her_.

He tells himself the fear isn’t what propels him to help her when she approaches him later that evening with a plot to murder eight men. It's his own choice, his own interest. Her vengeance.

One dark secret exchanged for another. A relationship built on mutual destruction.

~*~

And then fucking Randall.

Fuck.

It almost isn’t worth it anymore – the trouble of getting to the Urca gold. If this had been any other situation he would have been gone ages ago. The acrid stench of danger has dogged his every step since he arrived in Nassau and every instinct he has is screaming at him to just give it all the fuck up and run.

Run to another port, to another ship, to another fucking country.

He wants that money, but he rather wants to live as well.

If he can’t talk his way out of this, if he can’t convince a man who is utterly immune to his charm simply by virtue of being incapable of processing it…

He glares up at the tent ceiling, while the men outside confer regarding what’s to be done with him.

No. He’ll have his gold. He’ll bend the will of four separate men with nothing more than the silver of his own tongue and he will do it completely on his own.

_My. Fucking. Story._

~*~

James Flint is… fascinating. Honestly.

Silver has been so caught up in his own survival, he nearly misses the blinding realization of a soul that reflects his own almost completely.

But somewhere between Flint losing the Walrus and his captaincy, and the impossible capture of a Man of War, and manipulating his way back into control, Silver realizes that he has met his match.

Flint speaks his own reality into existence. Fuck. Flint speaks everyone’s reality into existence.

It’s everything Silver has ever strived to become, and this man, this force of nature, sheds inconvenience like a used serpent skin, sloughing off the word of God as though it is merely a suggestion – and a bad one at that.

Only now he’s caught up in Flint’s wake, he can’t figure out how to get loose of it. It’s terrifying, finding himself suddenly at the whim of a man who defies God so completely. Because how is it any different than being at the whim of God himself?

Silver can’t decide who’s more dangerous to him for a while.

In his desperation to find his footing again, he perhaps begins to inject a little too much truth into the stories he tells, lets the crew have a little too much of himself, of his own soul.

Maybe that’s the beginning of the end.

~*~

He starts wearing a cross around his neck before they land again in Nassau. He finds it in a cubby-hole beneath the hammock he’s sleeping in, some Spanish bastard’s keepsake from home, he imagines.

He stares at it for a full five minutes, trying to make his hands move, to tie the string around his neck.

He thinks of his mother, of _her_ grandmother, hanging in a public square in Granada. He thinks of Solomon, coughing and gasping for breath, dripping with water as the matrons forcibly baptize him.

He thinks of Eleanor Guthrie and Max.

He puts the necklace on.

~*~

The mantra shifts.

It’s less _my story_ now, and more, _everyone’s story_.

He makes a final desperate attempt at recovering the Urca gold. It could even be called valiant. But Silver is fighting a losing battle and he’s not even sure who it is that’s winning.

Fuck. He wasn’t supposed to care anymore. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t care about anyone else ever again. He’d had exactly enough caring in him to love his brother and then lose him. That was it.

But lying is getting harder. To the men, to Flint, to himself.

Every time he stamps his foot on deck to announce a new item, it echoes with the sound of dozens of men keeping the beat with him.

He once told Eleanor that guilt is natural. And that it also goes away if you let it.

Nothing about any of this feels natural. And he doesn’t know how to make it go away.

~*~

Silver hasn’t prayed in years.

But that was before Charlestown.

When they take his leg, Silver has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming out to God. Something indefinable, something built into his very being, is forcibly awakened in that moment, and he _knows_. He can deny God all he wants, but on the verge of death, on the verge of such inescapable horror, there is just the two of them.

His face is swollen, the tears streaming freely as Silver screams profanities to keep from screaming the words his soul is desperate for. He would give in to the impulse if he didn’t know... _fuck_ , if he didn’t fear that the men, these men he’s come to love (how the _hell_ did that happen?), if he wasn’t terrified that they would abandon him the moment they knew.

Because he can’t bear the thought of losing brothers over something so ludicrous again.

It’s torture, forcefully keeping himself conscious, present, as aware as possible to keep from letting anything slip.

He manages to keep himself reined in up until he feels the teeth of the saw begin to slice into bone. The pain is indescribable, the sound of it… he feels it in his teeth, in the roots of his hair, ripping into his throat and he is suddenly himself and not himself at the same time, his soul is splitting away from his body, and if he doesn’t scream out for God now then he’ll never be whole again.

He bites through his own tongue, nearly severing it, and finally passes out.

Later, when the opium haze hits and he spills every secret he has, no one can understand him.

~*~

The first time he wakes up, barely conscious in his drugged stupor, he takes off the damned necklace.

~*~

Silver thinks: _Maybe God likes it when I fight with him_.

When he’s alone, he has a tendency to get a little too philosophical, a little too introspective. It’s why he usually attempts to keep busy. Working aboard a ship generally manages to keep the brooding at bay, but with whole weeks confined to a bed, before he’s allowed back on his feet (fuck, _foot_ ), all he has are his thoughts.

And he wonders now, whether he’s been playing into God’s plan all along. Because no matter how angry he gets, how defensive, how many “fuck you”s he flings to the heaven, isn’t it all just proof that he still believes God is there, despite it all?

Silver doesn’t know how to counter that.

Maybe he doesn’t want to anymore.

~*~

One night the pain gets so bad he ends up vomiting all over the cabin floor.

The retching is so violent, he can’t get a breath in. Sweat is pouring down his face, his curls plastered to his cheeks, and he doesn’t feel human.

Just as the heaving begins to subside, he shifts his leg, and his stump brushes against the edge of the window bed, and the pain brings on a fresh wave of nausea and Silver is lost to it again.

“Fuck, what happened?”

Flint doesn’t sound angry that Silver’s sullied the cabin. He just sounds worried.

Silver shakes his head, afraid that if he opens his mouth again, it’ll start all over. He’s shivering and his hand shakes violently as he lifts it to finally push his damned hair away from his face.

In seconds, the captain is right up next to him, mindful of both the puddle of sick and his leg, and a rough, dry hand is pressing against his forehead, beneath the curls.

Silver’s too exhausted to pay it any mind. He collapses backwards, shoulders sagging into the cushions as his breathing begins to settle. He can’t keep his eyes open.

“It’s not a fever, thank God for that.”

“Hmmm.”

“ _Christ_ , look at your eyes.”

Silver cracks one eye open as Flint begins to prod at the skin around it.

“You’ve burst the blood vessels here. What the hell happened?”

His stomach has finally settled enough for him to answer. “Nothing. Just the pain.”

Stunned silence shifts slowly into stony disappointment.

“Take the fucking opium, Mr. Silver.”

John sighs. They’ve had this argument a dozen times. And each time, Flint has walked away more and more bewildered at Silver’s stubbornness.

He clenches his jaw, pushing past another mild tremor of nausea. “No. I don’t want it.”

Flint sits back, shaking his head. “I don’t understand this.” His voice sounds pained. “I’ve already sworn to you I will keep the others from entering the cabin in the interim. But if you don’t take the drugs, your body will not be able to heal, and you must heal, Mr. Silver, if you’re ever going to be quartermaster of this crew.”

Silver’s eyes are shut tight, screwed up as another wave of pain shoots up from his stump.

Flint hesitates before he begins speaking again. “You’ll be safe here.”

Bloodshot blue eyes meet earnest green.

“I’ll be fine,” Silver states, through clenched teeth.

Flint gives it another moment, before he gets up with a sigh.

“I’ll go get one of the men to clean this up,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.

Silver fights past a sudden inexplicable lump in his throat, blinking away burning tears, and tries to empty his mind. The moon is out, lighting up the clouds outside the window, a light sea breeze cooling the sweat on his skin. The ship rocks gently, safe and at anchor in Nassau, and he feels a moment of mild relief. He’s so tired. So fucking tired.

Almost without meaning to, he murmurs the prayer he used to say with Sol every night, letting the warmth of it wash over him. And amazingly, it helps.

He must fall asleep before the captain returns, because when he next awakens, the floor is clean, he’s feeling mildly better, and someone took care to tie his hair back.

~*~

He knows there is a prayer for the deceased. Gideon used to say it quietly every morning, remembering his mother and father, both taken by disease a few years past. But Silver can’t remember it. Fuck, he can’t remember it.

Another sob tears through him, and he grips Muldoon’s hand more tightly, holding it to his chest.

He breathes, trying to settle, trying to remember something – anything that he can say right now.

One of Solomon’s favorite stories comes back to him in a slow trickle of memory.

He tries to speak, but his throat is raw and his chest constricting too tightly to make a sound. He coughs several times and tries again.

“ _How did the mighty fall in the midst of the battle? Jonathan, on your high places you were slain…_ ” Silver holds back another sob, needing to finish this. Needing to see it through.

“ _I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan, you were very pleasant to me… Your love…_ ” Silver’s voice cracks, and he shakes his head. “ _Your love was more wonderful to me than the love of women._ ”

Muldoon’s sightless eyes waver at him, a trick of the light through the water making them look almost alive.

 _“How have the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished._ ”

His voice trails off into a whisper. What good is it? What good are any of his words, if this is all he can do with them, right now, in this moment? The water laps gently at the walls of the ship, and it’s almost peaceful beneath the horror.

“Why?” he finally asks.

But the why doesn’t really matter. It’s an empty question, with no answer, at least none forthcoming. Life isn’t fair. God isn’t fair. He just _is_.

They are all pinpoints of light in a dark world, and any stray gust of wind can snuff them out in a moment. It is too much to ask that a candle burn forever, after all.

He thinks of David and Jonathan, of how similar Solomon’s and Muldoon’s eyes look in death, and he sits quietly until someone finally unlocks the hatch.

~*~

Are prayers cumulative? Does one spoken prayer on its own do nothing, but several over time manage to move the heavens at last? It’s his only explanation for when the wind returns, and the ship carries them towards life once again.

The wind returns and Silver doesn’t know who to accredit it to. Flint’s spirit or God’s mercy.

~*~

Never mind. God’s got some twisted fucking sense of humor, Silver thinks later that same night, trapped in a cage. It wasn’t God’s mercy. It’s sport. He mutters darkly to himself that night while glaring up at the moonless sky.

~*~

Over time, Silver finds he understands Madi. More than she realizes, that’s for certain.

Sisters from brothers, mothers from sons, husbands from wives. Suffering he could never imagine, she says to him.

To tell her otherwise would be to belittle her pain, and it is a pain that he does not need to imagine, can remember all too well. So he stays silent instead.

But he keeps his eyes and ears open over the next several weeks, because something about the people on Maroon Island calls to him.

There isn’t much to do on the island, and he finds himself falling into the same pattern he used to keep with Solomon at the orphanage, telling God about his days there, just to have someone to talk to. Silver was left to act as an ambassador, but really, no one is quite sure what to do with Silver, and for the most part, he is left to his own devices.

So he talks.

There’s something funny in that, he thinks. He imagines Flint’s face if he ever realized that even on his own, in a room by himself, John Silver is still incapable of shutting the fuck up.

Besides, it distracts him from the blinding pain in his stump, now swollen and red, shining in a way Silver knows is a bad sign. It’s hot to the touch, and the pucker where the skin was folded together has begun to pull. Sometimes Silver imagines it will just burst apart one day and then he’ll die.

“That would be quite the end for me after all this time, wouldn’t it be?” he asks, through clenched teeth. “You’d probably find that funny.”

When the fever in his stump begins to spread to the rest of him, when it’s no longer only the skin there that burns like a furnace has been lit in his blood, he wonders whether this truly is the end. Would it be so bad if it was?

Silver understands Madi.

What he was not expecting was for Madi to understand _him_.

His need to look after his men, his brothers. His need to be seen as untouchable, impervious.

His need to _protect_ himself.

“I cannot look the part while being poked, and prodded, or while drooling through an opium haze saying who the _fuck_ knows what!”

And that’s far more information he’s given her than he’s ever given anyone willingly before, and he needs to rein himself in, calm himself down, before a life of secrets kept by forcibly holding two hands over his own mouth and heart at all times comes spilling out of him until he’s laid bare to her understanding.

“No one prepared you for this, did they?”

Prepared him for what? His whole life has been a preparation for constant terror, mistrust, fear. His whole life prepared him for never-ending loss. He almost laughs at her then.

But he listens instead, and her smooth voice rolls over him like a balm, soothing his spirit with that damned empathy and compassion that leaves him too exposed, setting his teeth on edge. He shouldn’t be able to feel calmed and terrified at the same time, but he does in that moment.

The healer’s poultice helps. The pain is reduced, the fever begins to recede. And Silver feels the need to give Madi something to repay this debt he has unexpectedly accumulated with her.

The burden is not the men, he tells her, but Flint.

He has taken care of others with no thought to his own comfort before. He gave everything he had to Solomon and it didn’t matter. He gave his leg to his men, and watched them die, watched Muldoon die. He knows what that is like, and will not fall beneath the weight of it.

But Flint.

Oh.

Flint is like God. Or if not like God, then like the angel that Jacob wrestled with until morning came. Flint is someone too big, too dangerous, too beyond his control to bear. Silver has spent his life wrestling with God. He has fought and cursed and spit and it hasn’t mattered. What is another drop of water in the vast ocean? What is a tempest at sea? A ship and its men may be tossed to oblivion, but the wind and the rain are swallowed up by endless depths that pay them no mind.

All of his willpower, all of his anger? What have they amounted to? His heart still cried out for God when he was sure that death had come for him, even if his tongue did not. As much as he has blustered and railed against the sea, the sea has simply swallowed him up and spit him back out time and time again.

He can no more steer God than he can Flint. He’s had years of experience to prove the futility of it all.

If he is swallowed up by Flint’s darkness, he doesn’t think that he will ever emerge again.

And yet…

How did Madi know? How could she possibly have known, in this place, on the edge of his own humanity, the words he had spoken to Solomon all those years ago?

Her voice is a port, constant and solid.

“Maybe, to go to such a place, one needs another to hold the tether, and to find the way out.”

He sees two boys alone in a room a lifetime ago.

_Some things keep you tethered to yourself, no matter how hard others may try to pull you away._

~*~

When he can finally stand again, Madi grips his hand tightly to keep him steady, and he thinks maybe wrestling the angel won’t be as bad as he fears.

~*~

In another time, in another age, Silver wonders if he would have been a prophet. He spins circles around the tavern with his tongue, winding a story, pulling everyone in, injecting his own deep silence into the hanging silence of dozens of men waiting for his next word.

He would laugh, if he could, watching their eyes follow him, watching their fear begin to edge into the lines of their faces.

Not at the story. No. The words might be his, but the story… _Flint_ , is real.

Fucking Dufresne, though, shattering the illusion he’s created with one question.

“Is that it?”

The challenge runs up Silver’s spine like a groping hand.

Half a man, Dufresne calls him. Silver knows, logically, that he’s referring to his leg, but some part of him is suddenly sixteen again, in a whore house, staring at a man grinning with his cock out, and holding a shorn clump of Silver’s hair.

A forgotten rage and underlying terror begin to build in him, the red creeping into the edges of his vision, the icy fear flows through his veins.

“As for you.” Dufresne steps right up to him, and Silver has to force himself to hold his ground.

“I know enough of you to know that even whole, you were unworthy of half the attention we paid you.”

_I know enough of you…_

Dufresne can’t possibly be privy to the truth, but it doesn’t matter. The man’s voice crawls over his skin, the look in his eyes makes Silver feel naked, and the tingling at the base of his skull is screaming to the rest of him that this man is a danger to him. 23 years of living memory cause him to turn away and hunch into himself, to prepare for a blow that he refuses to take. He’ll deliver it instead.

The mug cracks when it connects, or maybe it’s Dufresne’s jaw that makes that sound, and as Silver steps up to him, sets his metal foot down on the floor right next to Dufresne’s head, he sees his own terror mirrored in those eyes.

His father glares up at him from those eyes, and the preacher and the church goers. The matrons and the rector judge him from those eyes. The brothel Madame’s almost-pitying stare is reflected in those eyes.

The men he fucked, the men who fucked him, the names, the abuse, the laughter. His own choking sobs and gasping breaths ring in his ears.

His mother cries at him from those eyes, and Gideon pleads.

Solomon looks up at an ever-blue sky.

Silver lifts the metal foot and stomps down hard. Dufresne’s skull gives like an overripe melon, like there’s nothing to it at all, and Silver stomps down again. And again. And again. Until those eyes are gone.

The silence is almost too loud, echoing around the tavern and his chest, but he can’t help feel a savage triumph at the headiness of it.

“My name is John Silver. And I’ve got a long fucking memory.”

~*~

He begins sinking into the darkness. Steadily, constantly. Oddly enough, Flint notices. After Dufresne, after Dobbs. He starts talking to Silver more often, starts sharing with him more often.

He gives him advice on how to deal with the men. He compliments his skills. He talks about Nassau as it used to be.

He talks about Miranda.

Silver isn’t quite sure when his perception of Flint shifted from one of mild curiosity and wariness, to one of awe. For a while now, he’s felt chosen by Flint, made special, elevated almost. It’s been a heady feeling, quite intoxicating, and one he’s never experienced before.

Yet now… the more Flint shares with him, the less he seems like a God and more like a man. And once he loses his awe, and his fear, it leaves a hollow place in his heart that he’s only ever managed to fill with one of two things. Rage or love.

The night before the battle on the beach they talk until well after midnight.

He almost isn’t surprised to learn about Thomas Hamilton. Almost.

The smallest pang of jealousy lances through him and he thinks: _I am jealous of a man dead ten years._

They talk philosophy, and humanity, and the Old Testament. Silver misses his mother’s book. Flint and Madi both have so many books, and he doesn’t own a single one.

A preacher once gave him a copy of the New Testament after a long passage aboard a ship he’d been working on. Silver still doesn’t know why. He wonders whether something about his face makes Good Christians want to save his soul.

Glancing through it had been painful. The words had felt wrong, and alien, lacking the cadence and rhythm and loveliness of the ones he’d grown up with. He wondered how anyone could prefer those cold words to the living fire that burned between the lines when he’d read to Solomon each night.

Silver had tossed it overboard after the preacher had disembarked.

Flint quotes freely from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, his voice soft and low, drawing Silver in, the words crackling and filling him with warmth, Flint’s tongue lilting and free and alive with them.

He wonders vaguely what that tongue would feel like against his own.

He can’t ever risk finding out.

~*~

He hears steps behind him. Not the heavy tread of leather boots, but the light, dancing steps of slippered feet.

Madi’s feet are tiny. Silver has started noticing. He’s started noticing a lot of things about Madi.

It’s so early, almost no one stirs yet in the village. The sun has just risen, the sky is a chilled, pale blue, and the sound of the stream and the morning birds have been Silver’s comfort for over an hour now.

“Are you in a lot of pain?”

Madi’s voice weaves in and out of the sound of the water. He has his stump resting in the coolness of it, his other leg folded in front of him.

“Enough,” he murmurs. “It was a bad night.”

She sits, removing her shoes and setting her feet in the water beside him. She shivers a little at the cold and then settles.

She’s holding two mugs and he smells coffee.

“Is that for me?” he asks. She hands him one of the cups and he breathes in deeply, eyes falling shut.

They make their coffee differently here, steep it differently, let the grounds sit and sink to the bottom like silt or mud. But it tastes purer and unburnt and warm. There’s some sort of spice Madi adds to it when she makes it. He keeps meaning to ask what it is. It’s too peaceful to ask her now, though. Early mornings and late nights are meant for more than throwaway details.

He hears her hum as she sips, and Silver thinks he might love her.

And unlike Flint, Silver thinks that with Madi… With Madi he might be safe. There are no preconceptions here on the island, there is no impossible bias to overcome, no fear.

He has seen the men of the island strip and bathe in the river during the hottest parts of the day, and was shocked to discover they look just like him beneath their breeches.

Madi does not look at him and see what Good Christians see. Madi would not think him odd or different. They could simply fall together and be whole.

His heart feels too full and he needs to relieve the pressure.

“What spice do you use in the coffee? I’ve wondered for a while now.”

“It is called _ehuru_. I understand it is similar to your nutmeg.”

Silver takes another sip. His stump throbs, but the cool water is helping. He inhales deeply, savoring the smell of the spice.

“I like it.”

~*~

Being with a woman is so different from being with a man.

Madi is soft and lovely and round. She gives when she takes, shares what is hers.

Silver has been with many women, but never one he chose.

They spend the evenings in her room, reading, talking, laughing. He lets himself be easy with her, as difficult as it is, because he _wants_ to be easy with her.

And one night, he looks up at her suddenly, and wants to give her more. So he stands and shuffles across the room, each step with his metal foot echoing in the night, until he stands in front of her at her bookshelf and just.

Kisses her.

Softly.

Madi leads him to her bed. Her hands are steady as his are not when she sits him down, and pulls his shirt up over his head. She threads her fingers through his hair, and Silver’s eyes fall shut because no one has touched his hair since Flint tied it back in his sleep. Since Gideon. Since the brothel. Since Solomon. Since his mother.

They come together like the waves and the shore at low tide, gently, and Silver breaks upon her with kisses and soft touches and little gasps of breath.

She removes his boot with sure fingers, he breathes shakily when she pulls her own shirt up above her head and leans in to kiss her perfect breasts, holding her waist, tethering himself once again.

He tries not to shake when she removes his breeches, tries not to show how afraid he is. Madi doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t show any confusion or sign that something is off. Just takes him in her hand and pulls softly, and Silver’s head falls back against her pillows as his eyes fall shut and relief turns to pleasure turns to adoration, and all at once he needs to love her completely, fiercely.

He knows how to pleasure women, and he pleasures Madi. He trails kisses down her skin, dark and smooth in the candlelight. He runs his thumbs just beneath the swells of her breasts, his other fingers dancing patterns along her sides. He kisses up her leg, licking a stripe behind her knee, reveling in her gasp of surprise, and presses his fingernails into the arch of her foot.

By the time he presses his tongue to her center, she is arching off the bed, her head thrashing, her hands gripping his hair once again and he never wants her to let go.

Her brings her to completion, lets her rest, and then does it once more.

By the time he slides into her, her limbs are loose and she’s ready and waiting, and he rolls them over so he can watch her take her pleasure from him for a third time. He comes with a cry, tears stinging behind his eyes, and his fingers digging into her hips, holding on for dear life.

Later, much later, after the initial silence, and the soft kisses and the questing fingers to make sure they’re both still real, he tells her that she feels safe.

“I haven’t felt safe in… a very long time.” He pulls back so he can see her eyes, so she can see his earnestness. She leans up and kisses him, before settling back down. “I think. Maybe… If I could just stay here with you, in your arms like this, danger would never come looking for me again.”

He does not yet know that somewhere across the Caribbean Sea, Billy is forging a new identity for him out of darkness and fire and rage. He does not yet know that men speak his name in whispered huddles, in fear, in awe, in expectation.

He does not yet know that he has become king.

~*~

He trains with Flint in the morning. He is surrounded by Madi at night.

He loves them both.

Silver thinks: _Maybe God will let me have this._

It’s too much to hope for.

~*~

Moses hadn’t wanted to be God’s chosen one, but he’d done it anyway, and been rewarded.

Jonah had run, and God punished him for it, flinging him into the sea to be swallowed by the whale.

John wonders why, if he gave in, and has been walking the path he was set without complaint, if he’s continued to do what God and everyone has seemed to want him to do, why he feels like he is still battling at sea, gasping for breath.

Flint asks him, up on the bluffs, who he is and where he came from.

Silver doesn’t even think twice. He repeats the same lies he’s told before, lies that have become second nature, a shield of sorts.

Only Flint isn’t having it.

“It isn’t important.” Another lie. It is _everything_. It is so intrinsically part of who he is, that to share it and have Flint look at him differently would surely kill him.

He has faced God with his shoulders set and his back straight. But to lose Flint’s regard? He cowers at the thought.

And Flint sees that. Silver loves him a little bit more for it, another shard in his heart, slowly destroying him.

“I’m not angry with you. It’s just… you _know_ my story. And for some reason I cannot figure-“

“I don’t want you to know mine.”

It is the truest thing he has ever said to Flint. He will not acknowledge how much that hurts.

He doesn’t go to Madi that night. He lies awake by the stream and looks up at the stars, a fist pressed to his chest against the sharp pain.

Flint doesn’t bring it up again, and Silver is grateful and so very ashamed.

“I’m no one. From nowhere. Belonging to nothing,” he says to Israel Hands from deep in the belly of the whale, a wry laugh escaping him on the last word, because this is true too. For the first time, he has a sudden flash of clarity and it both settles and chills him. Despite everything he has been through, everything he has endured, he is null and void in the sweeping tragedy that is God’s world. He’s just a tool - a boulder placed in a river flow to reset the current.

~*~

Nassau moves around him and separate from him over the next few days. He watches as men and war and terror crash against his own solid existence and pass on, debris caught in a flood.

Madi is no longer a tether, rather, she has become something he grips tightly to himself, for fear she will be washed away with everything else.

Flint is too large an obstruction to pass at all.

He is so very tired. Of the war, of fear, of planning for an uncertain future.

But he harbors inside of him a new secret now. A secret that could break Flint down, remove him from the stream of events entirely.

Silver isn’t sure how he feels about that. Isn’t sure his exhaustion is enough to warrant it. And to truly remove Flint’s obstruction to the passage of lives around him, he will have to let go of Madi as well in the process.

He is caught in some special kind of nightmare, where he is Samson over and over again, pulling pillar after pillar down onto his own head until they are all free.

~*~

Eventually, Flint leaves him no choice.

Some part of Silver always knew it would come down to Flint. That the man’s endless rage and Silver’s own love for him would force his hand.

But he endangered Madi. Madi, back from the dead once and now maybe dead again. Madi, who carries her own version of Flint’s rage. Madi, who will never forgive him for what he is going to do.

God spoke the world into existence. But even God eventually said, “Enough.”

And this new world that Flint has brought about is enough. It’s too much. Silver let it all go too far and now the only way to end it is to condemn himself to misery once again.

So he stands on an island, and points a pistol at one half of his heart (the other half, oh the other half may be gone already), and lands the final blow.

And then, like the Sabbath, he rests.

~*~

The trip to Savannah is not an easy one.

He sits with Flint every day. At first, he is determined to endure whatever Flint throws at him. He thinks, at the very least, he should have to face the abuse of the man he has destroyed so completely.

But Flint won’t speak to him. He won’t even look at him. Silver spends hours in the cabin with a man who refuses to acknowledge his existence. It’s almost a relief. It _would_ be a relief if it didn’t leave him feeling so very hollow.

He wishes Flint would rage at him, rage like he did against the English. Rage like Silver has raged against God.

But Flint doesn’t have any rage left in him. Doesn’t seem to have much of anything left at all.

So Silver talks. He talks and talks and says nothing.

He doesn’t think Flint believes him about Thomas. He doesn’t think Flint believes that when they land in Savannah, there will be joy waiting for him. Silver has no idea how to convince him of it, and every time he says Thomas’s name, he catches the faintest grimace from Flint, as though the sound of that name on Silver’s tongue is abhorrent to him.

And then one day, it occurs to Silver, that Flint believes everything that he’s ever told him to be a lie. It’s a terrifying thought for myriad reasons, not least of which is that Flint doubts his intentions now.

But the most terrifying reason, is that in order to make Flint trust him, to balance the scales, Silver will have to say something true.

His most painful memory is one of the first he remembers, and he does not want his last memories of Flint to surpass it. But there’s no escaping this.

He doesn’t sleep that night. He sinks into himself, tearing down wall after wall, leaving himself raw and open and afraid.

He prays.

This is the last gift he can give to James Flint. And if it leaves Silver broken, so be it.

In the morning, he enters the captain’s cabin, closes the door quietly behind him and drags a chair slowly to face Flint, sitting on the cot.

The silence hums in his ears, and the sunlight streaming in through the cabin windows cuts a line across the floor in between them.

“My name,” he says, heart hammering in his chest, “is Yonatan De Silva.”

Flint turns his head very slightly, still not looking at him, but it is more than Silver has gotten out of him since they set out.

“I was born to a Jewish mother, who was born to a Jewish mother, who fled Spain when her own mother was publicly hanged in their town square for being born the same.”

The words spill from him like he is expelling poison from his belly.

“My father hated me for what I was more than he hated himself for fathering me, and when he realized he couldn’t beat it out of me, he left.”

Silver swallows roughly. His hands are shaking and cold sweat has begun to form on the back of his neck, trickling down. He takes a few moments to steady his breathing, to keep himself from gasping and pushing back, away from Flint. When he finally regains control he says, quietly-

“I had a brother.”

 Flint stirs, and a voice rough with disuse scrapes at Silver’s skin.

“Solomon Little.”

It’s the first words he’s said to Silver since they left the island.

Red-rimmed blue eyes meet distant green.

“Yes.”

His heart beats a thousand times and not at all.

“What happened to him?”

“He died.”

A pause.

“What happened to you?”

Silver’s mouth twists around his next words.

“I died too.”

Flint shifts on the bed, leaning his head back against the wall. His eyes fall shut and Silver sees him swallow.

“I knew. Have known, for a while.”

He freezes then, because he has heard incorrectly, he’s sure of it. Flint still isn’t looking at him.

“After Charlestown. After your leg. You, uh…” Flint’s throat clicks around another swallow. “You mumbled in your sleep. It was hard to pick out. I remember you had…”

Flint frowns, opening his eyes again at last and lifting his head. Something akin to grief passes over his face and he shakes his head. “The men said you bit your tongue, but I caught a few words here and there. Enough to piece the truth of it together. The truth of John Silver’s great secret.”

Silver’s words have disappeared, his tongue fallen still.

Since Charlestown?

Their friendship hadn’t even truly begun until after Charlestown. And yet Flint has known his secret this entire time, and still waited for Silver to share, to choose to open up. Flint still poured his own soul forth for Silver to peruse at his leisure, while waiting for Silver to trust him enough to do the same.

Waiting for a trust that never came.

An ocean of missed opportunities stretches between them. Such a long time to live needlessly afraid. Such a long time to live needlessly alone.

The cruelty of his own mistrust settles in his gut. It’s too late now. It’s too fucking late.

“Why would you ever think it mattered to me?” Flint asks him, so very softly.

And there. Reality sets in again. Silver really is so very tired.

“Because you have to ask why it would matter. Because you know it matters to others. And that makes it something you’d have to ignore.”

Flint is quiet for a long time after that. Eventually, Silver leaves.

~*~

“He’s waiting out there, is he?”

Silver knows that a part of James (for he is James now, Flint can never be again) still refuses to believe that Thomas is alive. Part of him wants to believe it so badly. Desperately holds on to the hope of a hope. It doesn’t matter. He’ll know soon enough.

“Yes.”

They stand on the deck, staring out at a white beach under a pale sky. Soon, James will be ferried to shore for the last leg of his journey, and Silver feels the encroaching loss of being without him clawing up through his chest. He will have to be shackled until he arrives at the estate, Silver warned him, even though they both know that James will not run.

He hates that his final memory of Flint ( _James_ ) will be of him in chains. It’s as good a punishment as anyone could have concocted for Silver.

James stares skeptically at the shoreline.

The launch is being lowered down the side.

“I’m sorry.”

Silver hasn’t uttered those words yet, despite feeling them acutely every day. James raises an eyebrow.

“I am. For…” Where even to begin? Has he done a single thing right by this man the entire time he’s known him? He thinks this might be the first right thing he’s done, and yet he wants to apologize for it most of all.

“For everything.”

James doesn’t look away, doesn’t grant Silver the mercy of escape.

“Goodbye, John.”

James hesitates for a second, and then leans in slowly and presses their lips together. It’s so fleeting, Silver almost isn’t sure it happens at all, except his lips burn like he’s been kissed by the sun.

“Goodbye,” Silver says. And something is different about his voice. The edge is gone, the power removed, and Silver thinks: _You have ruined me, Delilah. I am broken at last_.

~*~

In the end, it’s just him and God.

He stands on the bluffs of Maroon Island. Flint has gone. Madi has gone. He is all that remains.

He looks west.

In the morning, he’ll sail to Havana.

And from there, maybe he’ll book passage to Brazil.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The prayer that Silver keeps saying is the shema. "Hear o Israel, the lord is our God, the lord is One." This prayer is unequivocally the most Jewish prayer that exists, and has been known to be uttered in the moment before death.


End file.
